Up for Air

Well, the big project is done.  Except the part in the end where I generate a list of records rejected because they seemed to be duplicates, which appears to have been an evenly mixed bag of “hey look, clever software” and “what were those programmers smoking!” That was a completely unexpected 30-odd hours of work to whittle square data into passably round shape.

One of the craziest bits, if not a lot of work, was realizing that the country field could only hold two characters and that must imply there are standard country codes, just as there are standard two character state and Canadian province codes (I know all the former but not all the latter).  I looked them up and changed Ireland to IE, United Kingdom to GB, Venezuela to VE, and so forth.  Plus the non-blank ones in this country were USA, rather than US.

One of the hardest bits was taking the (pretty standard) two-part address fields and combining them into one field.

Anywho, that got me back to Deb’s dead computer.  I decided to cut to the chase and toss in the 200 GB hard drive I have waiting to go in a new computer for me.  I’m thinking that one’s going to end up being a dual core 3.0 or 3.2 with a couple gig of RAM, once I get all the stuff.  That and a big drive or two ought to keep me another five years (this one turned six during the winter).

It chose now to make it clear in no unceratin terms that the motherboard was fried and that was probably the primary, if not exclusive, problem.

It is interesting to note that I have another Intel D865PERL kicking around, salvaged from a machine that was also troubled, and which may or may not be definitively bad.  I’d been wanting to try it with a different CPU in case the board is okay.  Deb’s CPU should work for that, assuming it’s not fried too.  Meanwhile, I set Deb up with a salvaged machine, which as I type this I realize I forgot to fix the rest of the way…

Finally, I can just see Valerie on Saturday Night Live in twenty years.  She has an amazing sense of humor.  Both of them do, but hers is very early, very verbal, and sometimes downright diabolical.  The other day I commented that I always said with Sadie we got a Calvin, but it seems more like Valerie is Calvin now, and perhaps Sadie is Hobbes.

Anyway, yesterday we were trying to get Valerie to say “duck” for us.  What did she do?  She said “goose” instead!  That’s her sense of humor, and she’ll be 15 months old tomorrow.

Posted by on 05/20 at 11:41 AM

Next entry: Good Morning!

Previous entry: Happy Birthday

<< Back to main